Friday, 9 March 2012

Double doubled doubled (part seven)

Part seven

Honeycomb was suddenly silent. I ran through the workings out she’d be going
through in her head, wondering how quick she’d be. After about a minute, I asked her, “You still
there, sugar?”

“It looks like you were right, Mr Luck,” she said
finally. If my hunch was correct and she
was bright, there was only one conclusion she could come to (other than it
actually just being some innocent newbie with the right numbers in his name):
I’d recruited someone to pose as Alton74.
Always assuming, of course, I was the first private detective she’d come
to with this case.

“Get me out of here,” she said suddenly. “Please.
I’m scared. Take me back to your
office.” I teleported us directly to my
desk and within two minutes we’d swept it clear and the distraction sex had
commenced, her power suit vanished, but only from the waist down. Meanwhile, on my laptop across the room,
Cassandra Corvette appeared from nowhere, approached Alton74 and asked him what
he wanted. Mistake number four, but
people don’t think clearly when they’re under pressure.

“I want to dance with you,” I typed as Alton. “But not here. I know this great new place that people are
flocking to. Come with me and I’ll tell
you something you don’t know about the owner of this club.”

Of course, she couldn’t resist. I sent her a teleport from the builder’s
platform I’d erected a hundred metres above the office in which Honeycomb and I
were fucking. She took it without
checking the co-ordinates and appeared in front of me. Ten seconds later, she realised her (fifth)
mistake and disappeared, but a second was all the gadget under my desk
required.

She worked it out for herself. Honeycomb/Cassandra/Burnished stood up and
re-rezzed her skirt. “There’s no such
thing as a portable IP detection device, is there, Mr Luck?” she said.

“I’m afraid not, sugar,” I replied. “Just my little invention to dissuade you
from attempting to bring on your own newbie 47, but it also confirmed to me
that you had an IP device installed at your club – how else would you know your
own IP so readily?”

“How did you know it?” she asked.

“Wrote it down when you were here last night,” I
replied. “I have my own device installed
right here.”

“You’re very clever, Mr Luck,” she said.

“And lucky,” I said.
“You took on too much last night.
All those pauses from you whilst your alts were typing: that was your
first mistake. But I wouldn’t have realised
it were it not for the Burnished/Cassandra crosspost and the way you then reworded
it. Everything was just the two of us,
all along. What a double act we made.

“I realise that Rico – Dominoe’s owner – probably
actually was stealing your customers.
Only thing is, you didn’t just want to win against him; you wanted him
destroyed. It’s amazing what you can dig
up on other people’s old blog posts. I
found some very pretty pictures of the two of you getting married a couple of
years ago.”

“He betrayed me,” she said. “And then he had the gall to make out it was
me who’d been unfaithful to him.”

“So you cooked up the idea of a protection racket,” I
said. “Run your own business into the
ground and put word out it was the work of an all-powerful extortion group,
then approach Rico with the same deal you tell everyone you refused. Getting me to poke my nose in was just for
added authenticity. If Rico knew you’d
been destroyed despite a good fight, he’d be more likely to take the threat
seriously.”

“And he would have agreed,” she said. “I know him.
He’d have paid through the nose to avoid being grouped in the same
category as me, and he’d never have known I had him right in the palm of my
hand.”

I’d like to say it was a surprise to me that all her
previous investment in Frederick’s amounted to nothing, but bitterness is my
business and there’s little it can do to surprise me anymore. I gave Honeycomb the conditions for my
silence and she agreed. And she teleported
away from my office and back to her empty club; and I, once again, was grateful
to have demanded my first week’s fees up front.